PayPal Throwing Its Hat In The Online Daily Coupon Ring

PayPal is planning its own daily deal program in the U.S., joining the already crowded online arena where Groupon and LivingSocial are currently duking it out to offer the best discount. It’s all about options, these days.

PayPal, which is owned by eBay, says it wants to get the service up and running by April 2012, according to Bloomberg.

PayPal President Scott Thompson says they’ll get a leg up on what customers want in a coupon because they’re already in that game with over 100 million consumers shopping with PayPal accounts and using eBay.

“The experience is going to be completely different than anyone else’s through and through,” Thompson said in an interview at PayPal’s headquarters in San Jose, California, last week. “We’ll only give you something that we think fits the category of unique and relevant. Everyone else is going to bombard you.”

Sounds nice, but the double giants of LivingSocial and Groupon will be hard to slay, as they had a combined 73% market share in daily deals in October.

Competition is healthy, however, so we say, the more companies vying for our dollars and doing their best to top each other, the merrier.

Anybody with about $50 and some spare time can start their own “daily deal” site. It’s been way over-done, and the deals I was getting (before I got myself off of the mailing lists) were starting to look desperate…

Its interesting that not one positive comment has shown up here. It sort of indicates the general feel that people have on a company when the only good comments are to those who can debase them in new and unique ways.

So do I. Knowing the company as I do, and their lack of their left hands having even the slightest clue what their right hands are up to, I can see this as yet another clusterfuck instigated by upper management and passed down to clueless employees who have no idea what to do. It’ll eventually be written off as Y.A.D.D. – Yet Another Dumb Decision.